Exiled Rally Leader Says He Slipped Into China

By ANDREW JACOBS

June 5, 2014

BEIJING — Despite the ramped-up security for the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, an exiled former protest organizer whose name and picture are on the Chinese government’s 1989 list of the 21 most-wanted students managed to slip back into the country undetected this week, he said Thursday.

The former organizer, Zhou Fengsuo, 47, who had been a leader of the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation, spent two days in the capital visiting Tiananmen Square and a police detention center where several of his friends are being held before the authorities caught up with him Tuesday evening, he said.

After 18 hours of interrogation, he said, he was put on a flight to the United States, where he has lived in the two decades since he left China and obtained American citizenship.

With one exception, none of the other students on the 21 most-wanted list who went into exile have been allowed back into China; for most Chinese dissidents who go abroad, returning home, even for the funeral of a parent, is not an option.

Given the government’s fears that its citizens would try to commemorate the anniversary — scores of dissidents have been detained or sent out of the capital as a precaution — Mr. Zhou said he had expected to be refused entry when he applied for a 72-hour visa upon arrival at Beijing International Airport this week.

“It was a complete surprise when they gave it to me,” he said by phone Thursday afternoon, several hours after returning to his home in San Francisco.

The first place Mr. Zhou went in Beijing was the detention center where several prominent advocates of political openness, some of them old friends, have been held since attending a small private seminar last month to discuss the crackdown. Mr. Zhou said that the police refused his request to deliver money to the detainees, but that they did not seem to recognize his name.

“I was fully expecting to be arrested at that moment,” he said.

The next night, he said, a friend drove him around the city in what he described as a contemplative, highly emotional tour of the landmarks seared into his memory: Muxidi, the neighborhood where troops first opened fire; Jianguomen, where columns of tanks plowed through makeshift barricades; and Tiananmen Square, the place he spent so many days and nights as a 22-year-old student and one of the leaders of the protests.

Although he was tempted to get out of the car and make a public gesture, he knew it would be futile, given the cordon of police officers surrounding the square, Mr. Zhou said.

“At a certain point, I thought I would explode,” he said, “but I knew that even if I used my loudest voice, I would just disappear in a minute.”

Shaking with emotion, he said, he returned to his hotel. About 20 minutes later, the police showed up. The interrogators from the domestic security bureau were notably polite, he said, and some even displayed traces of empathy. One middle-aged officer, he said, recalled how peaceful the demonstrators were that spring of 1989. At one point, a young officer exclaimed, “This is the first person I’ve met from the book I read,” a telling disclosure given that most information about the crackdown is omitted from Chinese history books.

Reached by telephone, the police at the station house where Mr. Zhou was questioned declined to comment.

Mr. Zhou, then a physics student at Tsinghua University, was turned in to the police by his sister and jailed for a year. In 1995, he left for the United States and received a business degree from the University of Chicago. He worked in finance, but more recently, he has been devoting time to political activism.

He is a founder of Humanitarian China, a group that advocates on behalf of Chinese political prisoners. In 2001, he was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that accused Li Peng, the prime minister at the time, of “massive human rights violations” for his role in ordering the crackdown.

This was Mr. Zhou’s third trip back to China. He said he had never publicly disclosed the two previous visits, in 2007 and 2010, because he did not want to alert the authorities to what would seem to be a lapse in security. He said he tried to travel to mainland China from Hong Kong last year but was denied entry.

Fearful that his trip might have been thwarted, Mr. Zhou said he had told nobody, not even his family. He said the decision to travel to China this week was prompted by the detention of Pu Zhiqiang, a legal defender, and four other people who attended the seminar commemorating the events of 1989. “I wanted to show some solidarity with my friends in prison and also with those who died 25 years ago,” he said.

As part of his negotiations with the authorities, Mr. Zhou said he received assurances that his friend would be left alone. “So far,” he said, “they appear to have honored our agreement.”